Damien Katz is the creator of CouchDB and founder of CouchOne. He began
his engineering career working on Lotus Notes for Iris Associates,
acquired by IBM. Further work at MySQL cemented his database engineering
credibility. With a number of patents under his belt and broad
acknowledgement of the superior sync capabilities of Notes, Damien set
out to create a new kind of database better suited to the needs of web
and cloud computing.

In April, 2005 he posted on his blog about a new database engine he was
working on, stating it would be a "storage system for a large scale
object database" and that it would be called CouchDB (Cluster Of
Unreliable Commodity Hardware). It was designed from the ground up to
serve web applications and was written the Erlang OTP platform because
of its world class reliability and concurrency. In 2008, it became a
top-level Apache project maintained at the Apache Software Foundation.
In 2009, Damien, founded
CouchOne.

Erlang is ideal for writing robust highly concurrent applications and allows for a flexible design that is easily scalable and readily extensible. CouchDB's replication and sync capabilities make it ideal as a datastore on mobile devices. What happens when you put all these components two together? During his talk, Damien Katz will provide a brief introduction to CouchDB, illustrate how CouchDB functions as a datastore for mobile devices and the challenges of porting to mobile environments like iOS and explain its native replication capability to solve user issues with low, intermittent or no internet connectivity.

Target audience: Medium technical level with an interest in web or mobile dev.

Talk objectives: To show how Erlang can run on constrained devices like mobile phones. And how CouchDB's data sharing model is a good fit for that.